Over at Penny Arcade they've posted a very lengthy and interesting interview with (the now bearded!) Gabe Newell.

We’re acutely aware of how much we annoy our fans and it’s pretty frustrating to us when we put them into that situation. We try to go as fast as we can and we try to pick the things that we think are going to be most valuable to our customers and if there’s some magic way we can get more work done in a day then we’d love to hear about it.

Part of the reason that we backed off talking so much about what was happening in the future is that when we’ve done that in the past, you know, with Half Life 1 it was a year after we originally said it would be, Half Life 2 basically if you go and read the forum posts apparently took us fifty or sixty years to get done so we’re trying to be careful not to get people too excited and then have to go and disappoint them. So we’re sort of reacting in the other direction and saying “okay, well let’s have things a little more baked before we start getting people all excited about it.”

The last article I read from him was well over a year ago. He said then they were more focused on new tools than anything else. He made it sound like most of the company was working on tools. Not one mention of it this time around. I read into it - Mac and PS3 support equals more money, which is our focus.

Yep, typical Gabe/Valve Staff interview - answer all questions with vague abstractions, liberally sprinkled with "the customer", usually not answering the given question at all, and the interviewer sucking Valve dick the entire time, either choosing to ignore the lack of an answer or not having the balls to ask again. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Gabe - just Valve's socially-retarded interaction process.

I thought the answers were fine, I don't really expect any interview to be a massive reveal of information.

Interesting first answer, Gabe almost kinda sold himself off as just kinda hanging around to fill the gap for someone more fitting. I'd like to hear another employees thoughts on Gabe's position sometime.

Hardware stuff was nice, good to see Valve is investigating into it. I thought the answer to ep3/others was nice, not new but gives a better explanation of their view of how information should be put out.(sometimes i think the reasoning gets lost with some people)

Contact. The EU welcomes the pain free. That's emotional impact.I actually think limitation is good for creativity. If we had an engine that could do everything, we would be in trouble. It gives us focus. ~~ Randy Lundeen